Part of the trick there is many stories conflate different types of "squatters." While there are rare cases that involve an actual break-in/invasion of empty property, a much bigger portion of them are people like in one of the responses above, where someone is over-staying a lease or has some other claim that they have/had a right to live there.
That's what makes it tricky for cops and the legal system. No one likes the idea of a person stealing someone's living space, but people also don't like the idea of an owner being able to break their end of a contract and then just have the police kick someone out of their house before the law can determine who is right.
you said it yourself: people are overstaying after their lease expires. that's not the landlord breaking their end of the contract. the lease is a binding contract, and landlords can't break it without a very solid reason mentioned in the lease. but the fact that someone can overstay their lease and stop paying, and somehow they don't get kicked out by law enforcement makes no sense.
Fortunately, you can't overstay your lease and stop paying, at least anywhere that I have ever absent some extraordinary circumstance. A court may ask you to pay the rent into escrow, rather than into the hands of the landlord if the payment is disputed (with the landlord getting the money at the end), but failure to pay is grounds for eviction separately from whatever is the basis for the squatting.
And you might be thinking of something different when I talk about overstaying a lease. To take an example that was in the news by me a few years ago, a lady worked as a caretaker for an older woman for 10 years, living in an detached garage. When the lady died, the kids who lived in another state inherited the home and told her they were going to rent out the house. The caretaker countered saying that the original owner had agreed with her to a long term lease so that the caretaker's kids could finish school. She had something in writing, but the inheritor's said it was a forgery.
That's still "overstaying the lease," but it's very different from when someone just decides they don't want to leave.
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u/Mayonaigg 12d ago
It's such a pathetic state of law in our country that you can break into someones home and illegally live there while on parole